Nature-Science-Environment Meme, Part II

The meme continues:

Some Invertebrates I Like

Banana slugs. Grasshoppers. Crickets. Earthworms. Spiders. Ants. Termites. Ladybugs. Bombadier beetles. Inchworms. Silkworms. Agave worms. Moths. Skippers. Butterflies. Bumblebees. Honeybees.

Huge and bright yellow and covered with a numbing slime, as found out at Outdoor Ed. They look at you with big heavy heads, then jump showing glorious wings. Black and shiny, hard to locate, the subject of children's tales about China. Lying on the sidewalks after a rain, making soil, feeding fish. Long legs, beautiful webs, strange nests of silk, bright black and red, huge and spread-eagled over rivers, small and furry and jumpy, with large eyes. Quick and fascinating to watch, especially the big ones -- but don't mess with the nests! Magnetic hills standing tall in Australia. Bright red and black, swarming on mountaintops and over doorways, dying on windowsills. Shiny black, proud, tilting ass-upward in the sand. Green looping over and over, eating leaves like corn on the cob. Spinning. A grub in a lollypop is an amusing object. Battering against the lights, futilely seeking the moon. Upright wings, watching and waiting to take off. Lazy floating against the sky. Buzzing purple flowers, becoming teasing-toys after death. Honey, and picking them up off the ground and placing them onto flowers.

Some Amphibians I Like:

Tree frogs. Ranas doradas. Spring peepers. Newts. Salamanders. Poison arrow frogs. Bullfrogs. Spadefoot toads. White's Tree Frog. Cane toads.

Small and quick with suction-cup toes. Bright yellow frogs from Panama stare at me from the shower. Little creatures making bubbles of themselves. It's fun to say "newt!" Breeding in an abandoned pool in California. So bright and deadly, like butterfly wings with an attitude. Huge, strong, capable of flexing themselves out of a child's hands to freedom. They peep like chickens, their eyes so huge and black. My friend from the About-Me page, it likes to lurk in toilets. Invasive pests, but also hysterically funny as the subject of a documentary.